These have been out on the market a couple years now.
Anybody have one?
How do you like it?
The smartest thermostat in the world can’t compensate for all of the other flaws and limitations most residential HVAC systems have. (Just like even the newest iPhone can’t get you through Comcast customer service any faster.)
But they’re pretty.
I just got a 3rd gen and I love it. Works great, has a ton of info on it (weather, temp inside & out, time, etc.) and looks fantastic.
Plus, NV Energy isn’t always fucking with my settings, most notably at the hottest part of the day so that the temp inside goes up to like 29ºC (84ºF). This sucked ass because my AC would then run continuously from 7pm until the early hours of the morning just to get the temp back down to like 26.5º (about 80ºF). I was going to bed after midnight every night this summer because it was too hot to sleep. The whole thing was part of a program to lower my costs and save energy, so I figured I’d ride it out and see how the savings were.
When I got my bill for August (the first full month I was on this program), I discovered I had saved $7. I ordered the Nest that night, got it 2 days later (thanks Amazon Prime!) and installed it myself in less than 20 minutes. Took another 10 minutes to download the app and activate it all online. I couldn’t be happier with my purchase.
By the way, FUCK YOU NV ENERGY!
For the benefit of everyone else, here’s what I said in the other thread that inspired this one:
That’s was to circumvent, gotpasswords; just don’t enable the Away feature.
I got 2 from my electric supplier for free. They’re really pretty but they don’t really do anything useful that’s worth spending money on. I wouldn’t pay more than $50 for one, and I wouldn’t spend a penny unless the house didn’t have a programmable thermostat already.
Part of the problem here is that programmable thermostats have been shown to have little effect on energy usage, especially for AC. While there’s some convenience/comfort to be had from lowering house temps at night, more than one study has shown the energy savings to be un-noteworthy.
If you let your whole house cool off or heat up for eight hours, it takes almost as much energy to bring it to comfortable “coming home” temps as it would have to just keep the temperature stable. Heat is a little more efficient in this regard, but AC is a “long span” system that works better when it’s allowed to create a stable situation and then maintain it.
Mileage varies and there are situations where programmable stats do save energy. But not in most houses. Savings people claim are often like dieting or woo therapies - if you suddenly start paying a lot of attention to [house temps/drafts/long unoccupied stretches | weight/health], the attention alone has positive effects… diet, diet supplement, programmable thermostat or Hey There’s An App For That aside.
Oddly, Florida Power and Light sent mail out with the opposite advice.
Is it more likely to help because I’m in sunny South Florida, or is it just a different reading of the statistics?
I should upgrade to a networked system…I worked from home this afternoon, and would have loved to change the temperature of the house before I left the office at lunch.
Do they automatically switch between heating and cooling?
For instance my programable Honeywell does fine keeping the house under 72 by kicking on the ac when it needs to. But on that same day it was 80 outside it may drop to 40 overnight. Unless I manually switch it over to heat the furnace will never kick on no matter how cold it gets.
My daughter has them. One thing that she was able to do that seemed very neat was to set it them to vacation mode when they left to visit us for a week, and then remotely set them back to normal when they landed at the airport on the way home. By the time they got home, the house was nice and comfortable and the kids went right off to bed.
I have one, and am happy with it. I’m controlling a 90-year old boiler/hot water rad heating system with it, and it lets me have the house the temperature I want it when I want it, instead of two hours later. Additionally, I run pretty aggressive nighttime and workday setbacks, and so have a significantly more complicated schedule than I’d want to have to program into a typical programmable thermostat. I can also tinker with said schedule easily from my computer or phone, or override the schedule remotely if I’m going to be home early or whatever.
I’ve never used the schedule learning, because I don’t have the patience for it to learn, and I don’t use auto-Away because I spend a lot of time out of its sight.
When I bought it, the only competing product with the same functionality (wifi, mobile app for scheduling and remote control) was a Honeywell that cost just as much and looked uglier.
All that said, there are some really common complaints about glaring lack of common features, for example, there’s no hold temp feature (only hold till next scheduled change). You can work around this by setting Away, and setting the away temp to the temp you want to hold, but that’s clumsy and it’s stupid you have to do it. I would suggest looking at the product suggestions page Home - Google Nest Community to see if any of the common customer requests would be deal-breakers for you. Because they haven’t ever implemented any of them that I can tell, and they seem to have that Apple-we-know-what-you-want-better-than-you-do thing going.
This. We have a second house that I’m at during the week and away from during the weekend. It’s nice to get the house back to a decent temperature by setting the thermostat remotely. However, sometimes my cable modem and/or router gets powered down and there’s no WiFi unless I manually unplug everything and reset it, so make sure you don’t turn off the system and ALWAYS expect to be able to turn it back on remotely, in case you can’t (especially during very cold temperatures).
I looked at the NEST but found it to be way too expensive for what it does. You’re paying a lot for its ‘It looks cool’ factor. I bought this model Honeywell WiFi Thermostat and am very happy with it. It is a little tricky to setup but there are numerous YouTube videos to help. And it was only $99. I doubt it saves any money on oil but I bought it for the convenience of being able to adjust the temp from anywhere with my iPhone (which it does flawlessly).
The Nest is a neat little gadget and example of cutting edge(ish) technology. The issue arises when you apply new technology to old systems. I’ve heard of numerous people who use a Nest on their 8+ year old system, and trouble ensues.
Nest claims that they are compatible with 95% of systems, but there is a huge asterisk. Older systems don’t have a power supply wire. To power the Nest, the Nest will turn on the unit and siphon some of its power. This is not efficient or practical if you don’t use the system routinely. I ran a separate power wire, and it worked without turning on the system (installed in 2000). Even then, I still had to run a whole new control cable (5-strand wire to a 8-strand wire) for it to work.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy being able to control the thermostat remotely and the auto-away feature, but it was a headache getting there. Once I get a modern system, I think everything will work fine. Plus, Nest support team is very friendly and helpful, especially when I was ready to throw the glorified hockey puck into the creek.
My in-laws have one, and it seems to work very well for them. They’re retired, and their thermostat is on the wall in the main room of their house, so it’s ideally placed for the NEST to identify when they’re there or not.
Plus, with their previous 40-year old thermostat, their house was always kind of hot- FIL wouldn’t turn it down until it was already too hot. The NEST tracks that kind of thing and adjusts accordingly, and as a result, the house is significantly more comfortable than before. I don’t know if they save any money though…
it’s been assumed/believed for decades that programmable stats did many wonderful things, including saving lots of energy and money.
The comfort issues can’t be argued. But whether or not diddling the temp up and down a few degrees based on time of day and occupancy really changes the net energy costs has been shown circumstantial at best. The more modern the home, the better the insulation etc., and the more efficient the HVAC system… the less net effect a setback or programmable has.
Yeah, in an older house where your heat pours out all the cracks, not wasting dinosaur juice keeping it heated all day makes a difference. In a reasonably new house, the cost of bringing the temp back up (or down) is pretty much on a par with just holding it in the first place.
Programmables are nice to have. But other than tinkering with the settings for night-time comfort and maybe to accommodate different occupants (housewife mom likes it warmer during the day, dad likes it cooler, etc.) they’re not (or no longer) the big energy saver they have been touted to be, or maybe were in the days of barns cooled by inefficient systems.
But… “everyone knows” how much efficiency they represent. Including power companies. A lot of it has to do with distracting customers from high energy costs by putting control in their hands… even if it’s largely illusory. (See: pissy comments above about letting the power company cycle AC systems…)
NEST is pretty, has nice ergonomics, is easier in some ways to set than most programmables, and Has An App. If that makes it worth 5-10 times the cost of a Home Depot Honeywell to you, by all means get one. But it’s not going to fix all the other inefficiencies in your HVAC and it’s not going to do more, in the end, than that $30 box. It can’t, any more than a $75 designer light switch (Home Depot has those, too) makes your living room lights better.
If everyone spent $20-40 on a reasonably new digital thermostat, the national comfort index would rise perceptibly. 
Many HVAC problems begin and end with bad thermostats - miscalibrated, worn out, too easily turned up and down large amounts, and without even basic setback for long non-occupancy periods (like offices empty on weekends).
Biggest problem I have with it is that they seem to randomly update software automatically and you cannot disable the “update” without turning off the wifi. My feeling is “If it works, leave it the fuck alone”. The last ‘update’ has given me intermittent Nest connectivity with my router. My router can see it, but it can’t see my router and every other wifi device I own is working fine.
Every update I’ve noticed has made things worse.
And their customer service sucks donkey balls.
[QUOTE=Hail Ants]
I looked at the NEST but found it to be way too expensive for what it does. You’re paying a lot for its ‘It looks cool’ factor. I bought this model Honeywell WiFi Thermostat and am very happy with it. It is a little tricky to setup but there are numerous YouTube videos to help. And it was only $99. I doubt it saves any money on oil but I bought it for the convenience of being able to adjust the temp from anywhere with my iPhone (which it does flawlessly).
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That’s the model I have, and yes, it does its job perfectly and unobtrusively.
I initially thought being able to control it from anywhere wasn’t going to be useful for us until we went on vacation for two weeks. I turned the system off when we left and before we got on the plane to return home, I logged in and turned it back on. Net effect was to save about $150 in electricity and still have the house comfortable when we got back.
I have a simple oil-fired furnace without central AC so my old thermostat just had the old two-wire, on/off switch functionality. And a WiFi thermostat needs to be powered with house current as a battery would just go dead, it is a wireless device constantly communicating with your router. So I bought the right voltage A/C adapter from Radio Shack, stripped its ends, and connected it to the WiFi thermostats power terminals.
Another huge advantage to a WiFi thermostat is being able to program it with your smartphone’s (or PC’s) interface. Programmable thermostats were always incredibly difficult to program because all you had was a small, monochrome, simplistic LCD screen (think an LCD watch face) and a couple buttons. The programming procedure was more cumbersome & difficult than programming an old VCR*!* Some programmable thermostats now come with their own color LCD touchscreens, but these add significantly to their price and are a waste. Because thermostats are basically set & forget the fancy color touchscreen sits unused 99.999% of the time.